That summer Emily once again joined the legion of wives usually left behind while their husbands navigated the seas. A few days after the annual Fourth of July celebration at Tuxedo Park, Edwin escaped to sail his company’s yacht, the Constance, to victory in a Long Island Sound regatta. The boat, though modest enough to be entered in the “small category,” still triumphed as “best in class.” For the entire season, the Constance kept winning its seemingly never-ending races, the nonstop success ensuring that Emily saw even less of her husband than usual.
Any blemish on Edwin’s happiness that summer came from his father’s business troubles, which Bruce Price had almost certainly predicted after quietly investigating his daughter’s future family back in 1891. Widespread newspaper coverage announced that H.A.V. Post had filed for bankruptcy. As treasurer of the Railroad Equipment Company, he was sued by the government, his personal assets and those of the company attached. In July the court’s conclusions were published: liabilities of $3.5 million and assets of $2.6 million. Fortunately, most of his private property was in his wife’s name and therefore safe from seizure.
The senior Posts obviously had adequate financial resources, so Edwin wasted minimal time tending to his parents’ futures. Instead, he excitedly parked his own family of four at the Babylon house for yet another summer, so that he could continue sailing the Constance. Emily dutifully spent an additional season with her mother-in-law, the women’s shared events with the children marked tersely in her agenda by date only. A photograph captioned “Emily swimming” seems almost a duplicate of one from the year before, again revealing a harried and tense young mother, this time with water halfway to her thighs, one son in her arms and the other clinging to her. No one looks in high spirits, least of all the overheated matron. Clothed in long, cumbersome skirts that are hitched up around her knees as she wades through the West Islip bay, Emily seems grimly determined to be the daughter-in-law drawing her extended family together.
Back on her own turf by the autumn ball of 1899, she was relieved to have regained her sense of rhythm. This year the October dance at Tuxedo Park was more popular than ever. In contrast to the dull autumn parties mercilessly flagellated by the city’s social pages, Tuxedo Park, the Times noted, had everyone “flocking” to its doors. And within a month, the Tuxedo horse season would open.
Given that he was a betting man, it was a blessing that Edwin was not at all interested in horses. He devoted his leisure time that autumn to racing around in his shiny new red Pierce-Arrow, whose horsepower he found infinitely more rewarding than what thoroughbreds could offer. To some extent, Edwin’s success during these perilous financial days had even won over his father-in-law. The two men occupied box seats for the December opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s new season, where hundreds of disappointed spectators could buy standing room only in the packed house. But though the nineteenth-century piece by Charles Gounod was magnificent, the scent of upper-class anxiety hung heavily in the air, threatening to tune out the talent on the stage. Operagoers were on edge with news that a market crash seemed imminent. “So close are the relations of finance to the world of society that even those who hold great fortunes felt and saw that a chill was in the air,” the New York Times solemnly reported.
The following day, Emily went to the first Assembly dance of the season—without her husband. Among the Old Guard receiving guests for the Assembly, three were cited in the New York Times, their leader Mrs. John Jacob Astor. Only one of the “young matrons” was singled out, the “new patroness” Mrs. Edwin Post, the appellation lacking the éclat of “debutante,” but it reassured Emily that she hadn’t been forgotten.
A week later, both she and Edwin attended the fabulous George Gould party, where Bruce Price was the star. Everyone at the dance knew the architect was just a few months away from finishing the Goulds’ Lakewood, New Jersey, estate, an extraordinarily sumptuous site even in a period of decadent overbuilding. George Gould, influenced by the royal French châteaux on the Loire, had commissioned Bruce to construct what some historians today still believe to be one of the country’s most magnificent private residences. Georgian Court, with its forty-bedroom residence and a casino and a racetrack the size of today’s Madison Square Garden, became notorious overnight when it was announced that the exercise square, or “palestra,” alone cost $250,000 ($5 million in today’s dollars).
But grandiosity on its own couldn’t guarantee knowledge of how old society behaved, as Josephine had lectured her daughter, it sometimes seemed, from birth. After all, George was the son of the infamous Jay Gould, a scion of recently acquired wealth himself. Gould had had no time to learn the conventions of the rich, and so, though he’d passed down his money to his son, George found himself unsure of court rules. Frightened of their English servants when they arrived en masse at the new manse, George Gould’s untutored family had reportedly huddled on the second floor, completely ignorant about handling their staff. Shamed and intimidated, according to the gossip Gould’s niece shared with Emily, the family turned to Bruce Price, who kindly instructed them in the ways of old money with the same expertise he had applied to designing their house.
Bruce’s easy assumption of such authority would be reprised in his daughter’s willingness to tell the country how to behave. Aesthetic and ethical priorities his daughter would value emerged in Bruce’s four-part interview about Georgian Court, written for the Architectural Record and later republished in the New York Times. Bruce explained that practical sense had dictated his design for the palatial Gould estate. Its appearance was not nearly as important to him as its function: “The moment you enter the house you have the whole thing before you. You not only know where you are, but you see the entire house as soon as you have come into it. . . . Not only is it a perfectly logical utilitarian plan, but also you are at home the moment you are inside the door. There is no need to find your way around.” Just so, his daughter would tutor others that good manners were always a practical matter of being at home in the world, of going through life pleasing oneself as well as others. It was all a question of balance.
CHAPTER 21
EMILY WAS LARGELY ABSENT FROM THE CITY’S SOCIAL PAGES IN early 1900; she was busy moving her family yet again, this time to 18 West Tenth Street, just three doors down from Josephine and Bruce’s apartment and in the neighborhood the young Posts knew well from their early temporary rental. The new location, along with its household staff of seven servants—including a Japanese butler, a Danish maid, French and Swedish nurses, and an Irish laundry maid—implied a substantial increase in income.
On August 26, when the heat was so intense that even the golf links were deserted, Emily and Edwin hosted a lunch at Tuxedo Park, one of only two society meals described that week in the press. Emily looked especially pretty these days, trim with a rosy complexion, a tireless hostess working hard to be the perfect spouse to an increasingly successful stockbroker. From her smooth-running household to her much admired dinner parties, Emily was the model of an ideal wife for an ambitious businessman. But photographs reflect a new flatness in the eyes of the twenty-seven-year-old woman, as if her life didn’t allow the light in.
Edwin, on the other hand, was in his element. He had become quite the epicure, some ranking his wine cellar with Sam Ward’s. His pride in the cuisine his table boasted took a beating, however, when he returned from a hunting trip to South Carolina, eager to stock the family larder with the dozen modestly sized terrapins he had trapped. The reptiles, meant as a fresh source of turtle meat for months to come, were scheduled to live in a wooden pen Edwin had built in the Tuxedo Park basement. He had failed to consider the viciousness of the little creatures, however; they inflicted bites with beaks somewhat similar to a bird’s, the result so nasty that most of the servants refused to go into the dark cellar, where the terrapins had quickly escaped from their cages. A struggle between Edwin and his creatures lasted for weeks. When a reptile escaped into the heating ducts, its lingering demise emitted
a stench through the house. On another occasion, an even larger specimen sank the hard, sharpened edge of its bill into Edwin’s leg and refused to let go, unmoved by Edwin’s blood dripping onto the floor. Emily finally made a deal: Catch them all and I’ll order them cooked for a series of dinners over the next two weeks.
But she couldn’t help teasing her husband. “As a gourmet you know that terrapin should be boiled alive,” she playfully scolded. “Smashing them with an ax”—as Edwin had done—“destroys the fine flavor.” The southerner Uncle Frank, she said, would disapprove. After the turtles were finally collected, she quickly turned her husband’s melodrama into grist for amusing dinner conversation. Emily’s sons had observed their mother’s style, and they worried that if she kept telling the story it was bound to be passed around the park, trickling down to their schoolmates. Then the other children would taunt the Posts about their father being scared of “a little turtle.”
The boys asked their mother not to ridicule Edwin, saying they would end up being embarrassed too. At this entreaty, Emily recovered the better part of decorum and consideration. Her children’s intervention caused her to rethink the quick wit she sometimes deployed at others’ expense, all in the name of innocent fun, she’d assured herself. As a result of such reflection, she resolved to avoid hurting others unless doing so averted a greater harm.
To compensate for her lack of marital camaraderie, Emily found herself depending on her women friends more than she had anticipated. Such companionship was far from reliable, however, as so many households reformed and relocated. Dear Minnie Gray, for instance, was finally getting married and would no longer be as accessible as she had been. Until recently, since the time they had traveled the same summer social circuit as girls, Emily and Minnie could depend on frequent visits both at the resorts and back in the city during the winters.
At the end of September, Emily and Edwin traveled to Bar Harbor to attend Minnie’s wedding. As Emily saw it, her dear but undeniably homely friend had herself a catch. Her betrothed, handsome William Coster, had recently opened a stock brokerage office with his brother Charles, where, admittedly, they were still at the point where they needed more clients. Most of the wedding guests assumed that the plain bride was exchanging heritage and money for an attractive husband. Loyally, Emily maintained that any physical inequity was more than compensated for by Minnie’s radiant charm.
One of the groom’s attendants arranged a surprise, and when Maria Griswold Gray Coster and her groom processed out of the church on October 2, the Bar Harbor band serenaded them with ragtime tunes that, typical of Minnie’s style, “soon destroyed every vestige of formality.” The nuptial festivities captured the pleasing unconventionality of Minnie’s new husband as well. William Coster had already gained an odd renown in Manhattan as a speed walker, traversing the sidewalks between the New York Athletic Club and the stock exchange in record time.
DURING THE PIVOTAL YEAR of 1900, Edwin struck it rich. He was making $100,000 a year, and the yacht of his dreams was within reach. His life had never been sweeter, and he felt invincible. In November he was one of three men elected to the New York Stock Exchange, his achievement noted in the New York Times. The New York stock market at the turn of the century was as heady as anything before or after, and Edwin drank it all in—the speed and volatility, the theatricality and flair. A few months later, Archibald Pell, Sadie Price’s husband, would join him. This was truly a man’s world, and Edwin exulted in it.
One of Emily’s Tuxedo Park friends, Julie Olin Benkard, would later recall how tense marriage to a Wall Street stockbroker could be during this period: “Was it a Bull Market or a Bear Market? Were new customers coming in? Were old customers being wiped out? Were we in a position to have an extra maid, or maybe we shouldn’t have any maid at all!” Sometimes there would be a stream of luxuries, other times husband and wife “would sit up all night for it was useless to even try to sleep.” But Emily’s husband knew no such limits. He wasn’t the type to stay awake from nerves. And he was rarely home to bother anyone’s sleep, even if he did.
Just as 1900 had turned into Edwin’s best year yet, it was proving oddly discomfiting for his father-in-law. Bruce lost several important competitions. Even his submission for the courthouse in Wilkes-Barre, Josie’s hometown, proved unsuccessful, though much of the community’s architecture had been designed by Bruce and lavishly endowed by Josie’s father. Instead, the town awarded the contract to Carrère and Hastings, their plans contrasting dramatically with Bruce’s top-heavy concentration on an enormous, dated cupola. Further dampening his spirits, Daniel Burnham from Chicago won a prestigious commission to create what would become known as the Flatiron Building, one of New York City’s icons.
By late autumn Bruce appeared at loose ends. As if casting about for something to do, he bought Lady Stratmore, an expensive mare, in time for an elaborate horse show at Tuxedo Park. Anyone professionally and personally connected to Pierre Lorillard always felt pressured to share in his equine passions. The family’s racing colors of cherry red and indigo black dominating the Saratoga racetrack, Lorillard poured as much money into his prize mounts as other men lavished on their yachts. In 1900, everyone marveled at a man who currently maintained eight stallions, eighty brood mares, forty-eight racehorses in training, and forty-five yearlings at his 1,244-acre Rancocas stud farm in New Jersey. Before he knew it, Bruce was forcing himself to memorize thoroughbred facts and figures that held little interest for him.
Spending her time supervising her young children’s schedules, preparing her wardrobe and the guest dinners each week, overseeing her servants, and handling the family finances, as the year drew to a close Emily seems to have felt that she, like her father, had unfinished business, no matter how carefully she planned her days. Her efforts to give some shape to her life, and the increasingly detailed attempts in her ledger to itemize her family’s pleasures, recall the words of the writer she admired the most: “If we’d stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time,” Edith Wharton would grumble.
CHAPTER 22
FINALLY, IN THE SPRING OF 1901, EDWIN MAIN POST WAS ELECTED TO membership in the New York Yacht Club. Now he could take his father out on a boat even better than the Macy.
The timing alone suggests that Edwin had made a killing in the market. These days, more businessmen were exiting than entering the yacht club. On May 9, 1901, the New York Stock Exchange turned into a chaotic scene of men climbing over each other to buy and sell stock in the Northern Pacific Railway, property Edwin had bet on months earlier. Pandemonium ruled for days. The public would bear the greatest loss, but, as one anonymous high-placed official pungently admitted, “While it was a hard trial, there was money in it for the rich.”
Edwin had no one at home to celebrate with, even had he tried. For months Emily had been more subdued than usual, feeding off of her cousin Sadie’s melancholy over her impending divorce from Archie Pell. However miserable the Pell marriage had proven, ending it officially was still a radical step. Sadie’s decision—or Archie’s in her name—further depleted the store of certainties Emily had assumed ruled her world.
But at least the support of those friends who knew Archie Pell to be a scoundrel emboldened Sadie Price Pell, and she was soon smitten by a much more solid man, everyone agreed. The Baltimore surgeon Percy Turnure had quietly declared his love during the past miserable year, while Archie Pell flaunted his mistresses. The unmarried couple (Sadie was formally separated) asked Emily to chaperone them on a trip around western Europe, a request she was happy to honor. But as much joy as she received from being with the love-struck duo, Emily’s displeasure with her own marriage confronted her anew. However proper the behavior of the amorous pair, their obvious devotion caused Emily to realize more than ever what she lacked.
The trio separated at times. Sadie and her fiancé stayed with his professional associates, while Emily hired a driver to take her from Paris to Naples. She decided to travel to Capri to vis
it the always interesting Cerio family. Mrs. Cerio was the daughter of the Freddy Princes of Newport, Emily’s friends from Tuxedo Park, where the Princes often spent their autumns. Her husband, Ignazio Cerio, a doctor, had already created a buzz with his local explorations; a few years later he would become a minor celebrity when he discovered the remains of prehistoric animals and stone weapons on the island. Today it is nearly impossible to travel to Capri without stumbling upon the name Cerio, attached to everything from hospitals to restaurants.
The Cerios warmly welcomed Emily to their villa at Anacapri, close to the ancient house of the notorious Dr. Alex Muenthe, a controversial island presence and the leader of a cult that practiced Satanism. Emily found Muenthe sinister, and she sensed that he didn’t approve of her either. Their mutual dislike thickened the island air for several uncomfortable weeks. Muenthe preferred “neurotic ladies,” and he found Emily “too forthright” and “too sure of herself.” Without a doubt, in spite of the faddish interest in “metaphysics” in which Emily herself would indulge a few years later, she had no tendency toward the dark side.
Back at Tuxedo Park for the Fourth of July fireworks, she walked right into a more compelling melodrama than any scenario Dr. Muenthe could have conjured. In weather hotter than usual for the typically moderate Hudson Valley, Emily and her friends complained about the temperature nonstop even as they tried to negotiate the local and very palpable tensions between the park’s founder and his wife. When Katharine Collier wrote to a friend that the heat was oppressive, it wasn’t clear if she meant the eighty-six degrees or the local hostilities. Pierre Lorillard, Emily’s ersatz godfather, was critically ill with Bright’s disease (the term is loosely used to denote kidney deterioration). And his wife couldn’t have cared less.
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